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I know that college basketball is a dirty business, but I'd trust the guy who has not had a hint of controversy surrounding him his entire coaching career versus the drug-addicted former washout from a broken home who has precious little evidence of many of the misgivings and illicit acitvity he talks about.

This guy has no reason to lie, and despite his washout status I'm inclined to believe that he did take that much money. Lots of recruits and players are paid in college, especially in basketball. Beilein wasn't even mentioned in the article, I'm not sure what OP was referring to.

I apologize - I didn't get the dates right and thought he was a 2002 recruit, which would have put him in the same first year as JB. So yeah, don't know why the OP listed Beilein in the title.

That said, I still have my doubts about the veracity of his statements simply because there is very little hard evidence, and at this point you'd think someone else would have started talking about it. I know that college basketball players are typically not strangers to payments and other non NCAA-approved endeavors - I mean, look at UM's history - but I do so various reasons why a guy whose life was basically wasted might lash out a bit to justify many of the mistakes he has made. Again, I don't really care that much about this issue, but I'm still holding out hope that not every reported case of payments is true; I'm an optimist about college sports at times.

So, we believe in everything anyone says about Ohio because we hate them, but don't believe what this guy says about WVU? Did you ever stop to think that shit like that was why Beilein got the job in the first place: because they knew he'd run a clean program?

The purpose of the article you linked is to detail the downfall of promising recruit Jonathan Hargett. There was an NCAA investigation of West Virginia and former coach Gale Catlett who was the coach during the time of these allegations. They could not link them to the violations. Beilein took over the program after Dan Dakich resigned and had absolutely nothing to do with this. The NCAA investigation was already in motion when Beilein was hired.

Here is an ESPN article from 2006 that talks about WV good fortune with the Dakich resignation and finding a gem in Beilein. The sidebar mentions how Dakich's fear of potential NCAA violations under Catlett led to his resigning and returning to Bowling Green.